So, the forced balding we saw with the 11 men recently is not standard practice in any state, except Selangor it seems. In the New Sunday Times today, police chiefs from a wide range of districts around Malaysia publicly stated that hair is trimmed only when necessary (and even trimming is said to be rare), while shaving is almost unheard of.

So, what does this say of Kajang police chief Assistant Commissioner Mohd Noor Hakim Kassim when he said that their act of shaving the heads of detainees “…was a normal practice under the Lock-ups Procedure Act…”? Is this another clear-cut case of discrimination and human rights violations? From the information we have now, I’d say so.

More importantly, I wonder how many more of these cases will be exposed to the public as victims become emboldened to share the truth, as a result of the public exposure and governmental response we are seeing on this case (as we saw earlier with the nude squats issue).